Opinion | ‘They Have Established the Backbone of the Case’: Three Writers Dissect the Trump Trial

David French, a Times columnist, hosted a written online conversation with Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and Ken White, a former federal prosecutor, to discuss Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial and Michael Cohen’s testimony.

David French: Let’s start with a big-picture question. I have less trial experience than either of you, but this deep into a trial, I always had a sense of the momentum of the case, of who is winning and who is losing. Who is more pleased with the course of the trial so far — the prosecution or the defense?

Rebecca Roiphe: In my view, the prosecution is happier about how things are going than the defense. They have established the backbone of the case, which is the false records, and they have provided a great deal of circumstantial evidence tying Donald Trump to those records and establishing his intent.

Ken White: When you ask who is more pleased with the course of the trial, remember that Trump is usually pursuing a public relations and political strategy at the expense of good courtroom strategy. In that sense, I suspect Team Trump is happy that he’s getting lots of airtime to push his narrative that he’s a victim of the elites and that the trial doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact on his polling numbers.

If you ask me as a trial lawyer, I agree with Rebecca that the D.A. is doing a solid job proving the elements of its case and telling the story in a way likely to grab the jury. So far, they are hitting all the necessary points.

French: Stormy Daniels’s testimony was far more riveting and disturbing than I anticipated. She described a sexual encounter that was fundamentally exploitive and potentially even predatory. In the aftermath, Trump’s lawyer moved for a mistrial, claiming that the details of that testimony could prejudice the jury. What was your assessment of her testimony? Did the prosecution make a mistake in asking her to describe the details of the encounter?